On the second day the British Army had already marched into Sackville Street in Dublin, setting out to capture the General Post Office where the rebels had set up their Headquarters, one of several bases where fighting occurred. The Easter Rising, prologue to the fight for independence, was crushed within a week. Nothing but the walls of the Post Office remained and the surrounding buildings had not fared better, such as the nearby elegant Metropole Hotel, which had literally collapsed and with it the pipe and tobacco shop on the ground floor. Some time later, an unusual headline appeared in the Dublin newspapers: “The Capture of Kelly’s Fort". Fortunately, this time the capture was not military, but economic: Kapp & Peterson, owners of the destroyed tobacco shop in the Metropole Hotel, had swiftly come into possession of new premises. The turbulent events of 1916 had also hit a brick building, at the corner of Sackville Street and Bachelor's Walk on the banks of the River Liffey, generally known as Kelly's or Kelly's Corner because it was owned by M. Kelly & Son, purveyors of fishing tackle. Kelly's had also been damaged extensively, but it could be restored, and the tobacco firm saw this as a golden opportunity to take over the shop, thereby changing its name. It was “business as usual” as proclaimed in the newspaper article, which was now run from the new Kapp & Peterson Corner, where customers could purchase the already well-known finest pipes and tobacco...read more
